E 286 
.P95 
1866 
Copy 1 



€\]t nation ani) tijf Coustitiitioii, 



A N 



r «t f 1 « 



IiKI.IYKltKl) bKrOUK THK 



CITY AUTHORITIES AND CITIZENS OF PROVIDENCE, 



JULY 4, 1866 



H Y J . LEWIS D I M A N 




I I 



PROVIDENCE: 

1' no V IP KN I' i: PliESS COMPANY, CITY P li I N" T Kit S . 
1 S66. 



iljc Uatioii anti tijc Cousiituiion. 



AN 



^t^tun 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



CITY AUTHORITIES AND CITIZENS OF PROVIDENCE, 



JULY i, IS 66, 



BY J. LEWIS DIM AN, 




PROVIDENCE: 

PROVIDENCE PRESS COMPANY, PRINTERS TO THE CITY. 

18 6 6. 






i 



'X'^ 



-2- , 



THE CITY OF PROVIDENCE. 



RESOLUTIONS OF THE CITY COUNCIL, 

Passed July 9, 1866. 

Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council be and they are hereby 
tendered to Professor J. Lewis Dijian, for the able and eloquent Oration 
delivered by him at the late municipal celebration of the anniversary of 
American Independence. 

Resolved, That the Committee of Arrangements for the Fourth of July 
Celebration be and they are hereby authorized to request of Professor Diman 
a copy of the Oration delivered by him on that day, and to cause the same to 
be published in such manner as they may deem expedient, fo the use of the 
City Council. 

A true copy : 

Witness, SAMUEL W. BROWN, City Clerk. 



OEATION. 



* 



'HO among us, fellow-citizens, can have forgotten 
^S^ how much this festival, in former years, was 
graced by the presence of revolutionary heroes, whose 
venerable aspect was itself a benediction, as with mute 
eloquence, more expressive than the living voice, 
they reminded us of the great price with which 
our liberties were purchased. Long as they were spared, 
the conspicuous feature in each procession, we needed 
nothing to tell us of Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, and 
Yorktown. One by one they have passed away. I 
know not whether as I speak the last survives to hear 
the ringing of bells and the roar of artillery, that 
certify to our ears the constant and indissoluble alliance 
of Liberty and Union. They have passed away, but 
their departure has taken nothing from the sacredness 
of our festival, for we greet to-day another presence, 
inspiring the same reverence and gratitude ; and when 
in all the years to come, we, and our children, and our 
children's children, gather to these annual rites, 
the day still shall seem apparelled with the same sacred 
memories, as we shall say, " These were the men who 
flew with Burnside to the Capital ; who braved with 



6 Oration. 

him the storm at Hatteras; who held with him the 
bridge at Antietara ; who bore with him the bitter 
anujuish at Fredericksbura; ; who tasted with him the 
ecstacy of the supreme hour when the serpent's head 
was bruised at Richmond." Long as these men survive, 
how can this day return without awakening in 
all our breasts a devout emotion? Let it be a day, 
throughout all the land, of glad rejoicing. Let every 
bell ring its loudest peal ; let cannon thunder to cannon 
from every city and village ; let age forget its infirmity, 
let labor cast aside its burden ; but let it also be a day 
dedicated to a study of the sacred obligations which 
those sufferings and sacrifices have imposed. From 
the triumphal arch that spans our streets, '76 and '66 
look down upon us. 

Through the tremendous struggle which the fortitude 

O DO 

and valor of these men have brought to a successful 
close, we have passed to a higher plane of political 
•experience. Like the patriarch, crowned with the power 
of a new name by his m3-sterious wrestling with an unseen 
enemy, we have come from the night of conflict with a 
new sense of our nationality, with a far profounder 
appreciation of the meaning of our institutions. The 
day that broke over our Peniel saw realized the splendid 
dream of Milton, of "a noble and puissant nation 
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and 
shaking her invincible locks." We had cast off forever 
the miserable sophistries which for a time had paralyzed 
political opinion, and stood erect in the consciousness 
of assured nationality. The night was indeed daik and 
terrible through which we passed, but remembering 
the watchful Providence that sustained us, we too may 
sav, "we have seen God face to face." 







RATION. 



It is, then, no disparagement of the good and wise 
who have gone before us, to claim that we have been 
brought to a deeper perception of the foundations of 
our nationahty, and to a more correct interpretation of 
those great ideas which are incorporated into our body 
politic. There are things which experience alone can 
teach, and doubly sad would seem our bitter sacrifices 
should they leave us no compensating lessons. Against 
our will the appeal to arms was made, and in the 
vmerring course of that ria-hteous Providence which 
holds nations not less than men to an account, they 
that imagined a vain thing were ruled with a rod of 
iron and dashed in pieces like a potter's vessel. But in 
such a political system as ours, the sword can never be 
the final arbiter. It flashes from its scabbard at the 
bidding of ideas. The mutual recognition, by the mass 
of the people, of fundamental principles of policy, is 
the only safeguard of public peace. " The foundaticn 
of government," said one of the fathers of the 
Republic, " is some principle or passion in the minds of 
the people." 

Nations are only larger men, like men endowed with 
individual life, obeying analogous laws of growth 
subject, alas, as the silent gates of Thebes, the tottering 
columns of the Acropolis, the sunken pavement of the 
Forum alike testify, to the same decay. And like the 
individual, the nation comes only in the course of years 
to know itself, to interpret its own deeper tendencies 
and instincts. Its moral greatness and energy are 
always proportioned to this self-consciousness. Ameri- 
cans have been laughed at for their faith in manifest 
destiny. Like all supreme convictions of the soul, 
when not viewed in relation to the whole scope of duty, 



8 Oration. 

it may prove the pathway to transgression and ruin. 
Buta"sense sublime" of some indissoluble relation to the 
vast range and purposes of that divine administration 
which overarches all ages and nations, and whose 
triumphant issue shines from the serene splendors of 
the latter day, can alone lift any nation to the level of 
historic greatness. The absence of this conviction 
leaves the annals of the great oriental monarchies as 
flat and dry as the Desert of Sahara ; its presence 
renders the three great successive commonwealths, the 
Hebrew, the Roman and our own, the noblest growth 
of time. Instead, then, of remitting our faith in 
manifest destiny, we ought to covet an ampler sense 
of our historic mission. Of necessity absorbed in the 
unexampled growth of a material civilization, the 
meaning of our own recorded past has remained 
hitherto an enigma to us. There has been little in its 
outward form to awaken interest. It is the history, for 
the most part, of plain, honest men. It is decorated 
with none of the illusions of antiquity and romance. 
No venerable monuments of by-gone ages overshadow 
us with a legendary lore that silently infuses its 
fascinating lessons. We have lived iu the future more 
than in the past. Not the most hurtful, discordant, 
contradictory views aroused us to a just appreciation 
of our annals. 

Need I mention, in proof of the slight degree to 
which the nation has reflected on itself, the fact, known 
to all, that the first philosophic study of our institu- 
tions proceeded from a foreigner. Nor was this fact 
without most momentous consequences, for great and 
undeniable as were the merits of De Tocqueville's book, 
and far as I should wish to be from detracting anything 



Oratiok. 9 

from its well-deserved repute, yet no one, to-day, can 
doubt that his strange assertion "that the Union was 
an accident," and his confident prediction that in case 
of a collision between the States and the Federal 
authority, the latter must inevitably yield, had a vast 
and most pernicious influence in shaping the public 
sentiment of England at the outset of our civil conflict. 
The conclusions of the fair-minded Frenchman were 
accepted without dispute, and were the source of 
those opinions so freely expressed in Parliament and in 
so many public meetings ; and had England incurred 
the deep damnation of that step to which at one time 
she approached so near, had she recognized as one of 
the family of nations the confederacy whose corner 
stone was an arrogant denial of what England for years 
had made her boast, the direful consequences might 
justly have been traced to this fundamental error 
respecting the nature of our Federal system which the 
authority of De Tocqueville had done so much to dis- 
seminate. Of such vital importance is it to know for 
ourselves, and to make others comprehend, the true 
foundations of our nationality. 

The author of the Palmetto Geography, published 
during the war for the benefit of southern youths, who 
derived the common law from the book of Leviticus, 
did not in fact shoot wider of the mark than many of 
those English writers who have aimed to enlighten their 
countrymen respecting our institutions. Well read in 
Thucydides and Aristotle, but ignorant of Hamilton 
and Madison, they have reasoned from the narrow 
municipal life of the ancient democracies, to our essen- 
tially original and imperial system. Misled by names, 
they have overlooked real distinctions. They have 



10 Oeatiox. 

repeated stale aphorisms respecting Republican institu- 
tions, forgetting, or not caring to remember, that the 
term Republic has been equally applied to the Dutch 
Confederation, in which dwelt no direct principle of 
popular liberty ; to Poland, the most oppressive . com- 
pound the world has ever seen, of monarchy and aris- 
tocracy ; to the Italian cities of the middle ages, which 
were mere oligarchies ; and to imperial Rome, where 
the distingushing feature of American republicanism, 
the representative system, was never recognized. 
Strange to sa}^, the sole English statesman of any note 
who seems to have seized hold of the fact that there 
was anything distinctive or peculiar in our liberties, 
was the leader of the Tory party in the House of 
Commons, Mr. Disraeli, who termed the United States 
a " territorial democracy," an apt designation, provided 
the immense difference be recognized between an 
American farmer and an European peasant, one of a class 
which hcs never yet proved itself capable of local self- 
government. 

We cannot too deeply engrave on all our minds the 
fact that our political system is an essentially new 
experiment in the life of States. The form of govern- 
ment here established has no prototype in any former 
age. It refuses to conform to the well-known division 
of Aristotle. We seek in vain to explain it by Greek 
or Roman analogies. It embodies novel political ideas, 
and can be explained only from analysis of its own 
interior principles. For purposes of comparison we 
may class it, as a recent English writer has done, with 
the Achaian League, with the Swiss Cantons, with the 
seven United Provinces of the Netherland, but the 
resemblance is superficial. Neither in the constitution 



S AT 10 N. 11 

of our Federal system, nor in the elements out of 
which the Federal system itself is formed, is there any 
real analogy. As our democracy is an original and 
unexampled democracy, so our Federal system is an 
original and unexampled Federal system. We shall 
halt and stumble in all our conclusions, if we do not 
reason from this postulate. 

Settled for the most part as English colonies, inherit- 
ing English maxims and usages, copying to a great 
extent in the method of our colonial administration, 
English parliamentary forms ; above all, bringing with 
us across the sea the boon of the Common Law, it has 
been our habit to regard England as the exclusive 
source of our political existence. Nor has the error 
been confined to our side of the Atlantic. England has 
loved to speak of America as an unruly but vigorous 
offspring. That our institutions are a mere offshoot- of 
theirs, has been a favorite opinion, especially with that 
class of Englishmen who have given us their most 
hearty sympathy. America, they have repeated, is but 
another England, without her battlemented castles, her 
ivied manor-houses, her gray cathedrals, her court and 
her upper class. New York and Philadelphia and Bos- 
ton, are Liverpool and Manchester and Edinburgh. In 
other words, that famous English middle class, whose 
characteristics Matthew Arnold has so keenly analyzed, 
reaches in America its perfect growth. 

Without wishing to depreciate the debt we owe to 
England, I maintain that this theory of the genesis of 
our political ideas is a radical mistake. We brought 
much from the mother land, so much that, notwithstand- 
ing the mean subserviency to selfish interests that has 
crept over English politics since the treaty of Utrecht, 



12 Oration. 

she is old England still ; but the fact cannot be over- 
looked that into the earliest shaping of our institutions 
there entered elements not of English growth, elements 
that were not subordinate and evanescent, but control- 
ing and permanent. We brought from England, it is 
true, the grand distinguishing feature of modern society, 
the representative system, but how altered and expand- 
ed from the narrow notions of a privilege conferred by 
royal grace on certain favored corporations was the 
right here so soon asserted as inseparable from every 
local municipality. In that one step, from a privilege 
to a right, was involved the immense transition from the 
middle ages to modern times. The first perpetuated a 
class, the second proclaimed the existence of a people. 

When, in the following century, the colonies con- 
tended, tliat representation and taxation were insepa- 
rable, though they claimed to be standing on the plat- 
form of old English liberty, yet it was evident that they 
asserted a theory of representation unknown to Eng- 
lish law. The clearest judicial mind then living. Lord 
Mansfield, saw the difference, and in hi^ place in the 
House of Lords, he declared that the claim of the col- 
onies, if grounded in right, went to the whole constitution 
of the British Empire. As a lawyer. Lord Mansfield's 
position was impregnable, for English representation 
from the beginning was prescriptive, the representation 
of classes, and, to-day, England is struggling for what 
America, from the beginning, has enjoyed, a true repre- 
sentation of the people. 

Nor need we search far for the source of this new 
character which representative institutions here as- 
sumed. The elder Adams, in a letter to the Abbe de 
Mably, in 1782, declares that the characteristic feature 



Oration. 13 

of New England institutions, which more than anything 
else gave an impulse to the revolution, was the ^3'stem 
of town government. But the New England towns 
Avere the children of the New England churches, the 
distinctive characteristics of the civil being derived from 
the ecclesiastical democracy. If, therefore, we would 
know whence come the distinctive principles that have 
moulded the New England character, and which, issuing 
from New England, have done so much to shape the 
political institutions of the new world, we must go back, 
not to the common law, not to the writs of Simon de 
Montfort,but to the mighty dialectics of a French refugee, 
who, from his asylum amid the Alps, with a zeal con- 
suming as Loyola's and a logic daring as Eousseau's, 
scattered the firebrands of revolution in the disguise of 
divine decrees. It is a memorable fact that the political 
institutions of this country thus received their most en- 
ergetic impulse, not from England, but from France ; 
and the abstract, ideal stamp then impressed upon them 
has not been effaced to the present day. 

This abstract, ideal tendency that so much marks 
American political ideas from the traditional, prescrip- 
tive character of English liberty, is shown in the first 
assertion of that Declaration which has been read to us 
to-day,an assertion once hastily condenmed by a famous 
New England oi'ator as a "glittering generality," but 
which, he should have known, was old as the jurispru- 
dence of the Antonines, affirmed, indeed, by the Roman 
lawyers as a mere legal maxim, but taken up and 
expanded by the great French jurisconsults, till a legal 
rule was clothed with the force and influence of a social 
principle, and passing from the hands of lawyers to the 
hands of scholars, became a principle of politics which 



14 Oration. 

promises, at the present time, to moclify more power- 
fully than any other the destinies of States. Not, then, 
to the English, but to the Roman law, do we owe the 
most characteristic features of our body politic, and our 
historic mission is not to perpetuate the limited, pre- 
scriptive rights that have sprung from the middle age, 
but to complete the illustrious fabric of Roman liberty, 
which, unlike the systems reared by the barbarian con- 
querors of Europe, recognized power not as an estate, 
held for the benefit of the possessors, but as a trust to 
be exercised for the common good. Whatever may be 
the analogies between American and English institu- 
tions, there is a radical distinction between a system 
which consists in the perpetual balance of separate 
estates, and a system based on one undivided sov- 
ereignty. 

The study of our institutions has been legal rather 
than historical. The lawyer, I know, may urge that 
we sacrifice the chief advantage of a written constitu- 
tion if we do not observe the letter. But in politics, as 
in religion, the letter often killeth. To the legal train- 
ing of George Greirville, Burke attributed, in great 
part, that blindness as a statesman, which did so much 
to precipitate the American Revolution. The ship of 
State can never be safely steered by slaves to precedent. 

In every country possessing a written constitution, 
there must be besides, an historic or providential consti- 
tution, and nothing can be more certain than that the 
former will never adequately express the latter. Naj', 
the written may not only fall short of, it may contradict 
the unwritten. The articles of Confederation, for 
example, were a written constitution, but they not only 
did not embody the actual living constitution that had 



Oration. 15 

controlled the united action of the colonies, they vir- 
tually subverted it. The colonies were less a nation 
under the articles of confederation than they had been 
while owning a common allegiance to the British 
Crown. Their inchoate nationality was only marred 
and defaced by that miserable makeshift, the child of 
narrow, local jealousies, which served no other purpose 
than to make them sigh for the unity they had thrown 
away. 

The written Constitution may exist or not. It may 
be amended or set aside. It is a human work, the 
attempt of men to give legal expression to a general 
fact. But the providential constitution must exist. It 
is the nation's organic life. It grows with the nation's 
growth and strengthens with its strength, and no written 
constitution can have any worth, or can endure for any 
time, unless the unwritten infuses itself into it. 

" There is a mystery in the soul of State, 
Which hath an operation more divine 
Than hreath or pen can give cxpressurc to." 

Let me not be understood to detract from the value 
or authority of a written constitution. Foreigners 
have wondered why we were willing to make such 
sacrifices and shed blood so freely for a piece of jsaper. 
They little realize the intensity of that inbred rev- 
erence for Law, which with us amounts almost to a 
religion. We can never estimate too highly an instru- 
ment which is, beyond question, the most refined pro- 
duct of political wisdom the world has ever seen, and 
the successful establishing of which Lord Brougham 
himself, in his better days, before a soured and quer- 
ulous old age had darkened the windows of his mind, 
declared to be " the most important event in the history 



16 



RAT I ox, 



of our species." But the Constitution is not the State. 

The maxim is often uttered, great jurists have given 
it their endorsement, that ours is a government of laws 
and not of men. John Adams calls this maxim the very 
definition of a Republic. When set up as a stay to 
hasty or illegal action, the maxim is a most sound and 
wholesome one. For it is unquestionably true that 
with reference to any private action the law is sov- 
ereign. The organic claims allegiance from the indi- 
vidual will. But the maxim ceases to be true when 
applied, not to one individual, but to the whole body 
politic. Here, not the law, but the people, is supreme. 
Not the government, but the State, under God is 
sovereign. " In the political order," says Mr. Brown- 
son, " the fact precedes the law. The nation holds not 
from the law, but the law holds from the nation." 

For the public weal the people may adopt certain 
rules by which to regulate their action. These rules^ 
until regularly amended or repealed, are the supreme 
method. Long as they remain in operation, the}' justly 
claim of every citizen, not obedience simply, but rev- 
erence and honor ; but to say that the law governs, is 
to confuse the fundamental principles of a fi'ee society. 
" It is certain," says one of the clearest political reason- 
ers of our day, the late Sir Cornewall Lewis, " that in 
every sort of government the sovereign power must be 
legally unlimited ; and that every government must be 
conducted by men." To surrender this fundamental 
principle, would be to exchange the progressive politi- 
cal development of Europe for the torpor of Mohamme- 
dan rule. To have first recognized this principle con- 
stitutes our distinction as a nation. 

We have, in fact, suflFered our instinct of nationality 
to become weakened by fixing our eyes too much on 



Oration. 17 

the written constitution. The government has veiled 
the older and grander proportions of the State. Even 
Mr. Motley, in his letter to the London Times, at the 
beginning of our civil strife, committed the strange 
error of asserting "that the constitution of 1787 made 
us a nation." It did, it could do, no such thing. It was 
the nation that made the constitution. In the words 
of the preamble it asserts its imperial parentage. 

By thus looking at the government rather than the 
State, so many of our most sagacious public men were 
betrayed into the admission that prior to the adoption 
of the constitution, the States were sovereign. This 
was the view of Mr. Jefferson, and was even conceded 
by Mr. Webster. From this view the doctrine of seces- 
sion followed as a logical conclusion. 

For when were the Statae thus severally possessed 
of sovereign power? Not during the colonial period, 
for then, as they themselves repeatedly asserted, they 
were mere dependencies of the British Crown. Not 
when Independence was first declared, for that declara- 
tion was a joint act, the assertion of a collective sov- 
ereignty^ Not as separate States, but as an organized 
political unity, they proceeded to raise armies, to carrj^ 
on war, to conclude treaties. Never were they recog- 
nized by any foreign power as endowed with other than 
collective sovereignty. The sovereignty wrested from 
the British Crown passed to the United States, nor by 
any act, nor by any declaration, nor by any pretence 
whatever, did any one of those States ever claim a sepa- 
rate and individual sovereignty. What though in the 
din of arms they became so oblivious of their national- 
ity as to accept the erroneous expression of it in the 
Articles of Confederation, shall an error of statement 



18 Oration. 

vitiate an historic fact? Let the whole dangerous doc- 
trine of original State sovereignty be forever dismissed 
from the public mind. Let the words of an illustrious 
South Carolinian statesman be forever engraved on all 
our hearts : " The separate independence and individ- 
ual sovereignty of the several States were never thought 
of by the enlightened band of patriots who framed the 
Declaration." 

Our political system will never be secure till this no- 
tion of original State sovereignty has been exploded. 
No military triumphs can accomplish this. To be con- 
quered is not to be convinced. But a few days ago, in 
a New York paper, the defiant declaration was put 
forth : "The South accepts the result in respect to its 
present practical application, but that acceptance does 
not imply any abandonment in thought of the principle 
upon which the secession movement was founded." It 
is but charity to think that by very many these views 
are honestly maintained, and that soon as the fearful 
ravages of war have been forgotten, they may reassert 
their malignant and destructive sway over southei'n 
sentiment ; and there is no way in Avhich these conclu- 
sions can be logically met but by ceasing to regard the 
nation as compounded of separate sovereignties. What 
though we claim that in adopting the federal constitu- 
tion, the States renounced forever their separate sov- 
ereignty, and ceded it to the central power? A 
party competent to do, is competent to undo, and 
though sacred faith may be broken, and solemn pledges 
may be violated by such a course, yet what prevents 
that some miserable plea that the terms of the agree- 
ment have been broken by the other members, shall be 
held by one member to justify witlidrawing from it? 



RATION. 19 

Do we say that the very terras of the agreement imply 
that it shall be perpetual ? Is not every treaty of alli- 
ance between nations in its terms perpetual ? Was not 
the Holy Alliance meant to be perpetual ? But what 
barrier have its solemn stipulations proved to the un- 
scrupulous ambition of Bismarck ? 

The denial of original State sovereignty is not the 
denial of State rights. The rights of the States, within 
their appropriate sphere are sacred and inviolable as 
the rights of the federal government. Our political 
system is exposed to no greater peril than is involved 
in the tendency to centralization of power. But with 
explicit division of powers there is no division of sov- 
ereignty. The State entrusts its functions to a double 
set of agents, but does not abdicate its indivisible and 
inalienable supremacy. Between the federal and State 
functions no issue of subordination can arise. 

Mr. Calhoun, misled by mere external resemblances, 
fancied that he saw in the adjustment of our Federal 
and State authority, a reproduction of the English sys- 
tem of checks and balances, and he would have ren- 
dered it more efficient by a dual executive, and by sub- 
stituting concurrent for numerical majorities. It is 
incomprehensible how so acute a mind should have so 
wholly misconceived the genius of our system. The 
British constitution, which bears in all its features the 
marks of the lono; conflict of classes out of which it 
sprung, and which, like the proud Keep of Windsor, to 
which it has been compared, is a majestic monument of 
feudal civilization, seeks in the balance of Three Estates 
a safeguard against despotism. English liberties have 
grown from this antagonism. But in our system such 
antagonism can have no place. Our Federal and State 



20 On AT I OK. 

governments do not represent riA'al classes or antag- 
onistic interests. Our interests are homogeneous and 
organic. The Federal and State governments are not 
centripital and centrifugal forces; thej are happily 
combined like the double motion of the earth on its 
axis and in its orbit. 

Keeping in mind this distinction between the State 
and government, we can easily estimate the value of 
that aphorism so often uttered, " that the Federal tie is 
weak because it is artificial." Is not every form of 
government artificial ? Can the term be applied to the 
clauses of our Federal Constitution with any more pro- 
priety than to the Reform Bill or the Bill of Rights, or 
even to Magna Charta? Or, in what sense are the inter- 
pretations of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, 
which ultimately fix its meaning, any more artificial 
than the long series of Pretorian Edicts which stamped 
its peculiar character on Roman Law ? If the objec- 
tion has any force, it applies to every form of govern- 
ment that has ever existed since the legislation of 
Solon, or the Laws of the Ten Tables. Sir James 
Mackintosh gained great reputation once for saying that 
" Constitutions are not made, but grow." The only 
meaning of such a maxim is the simple and obvious 
meaning that constitutions must be framed in accord- 
ance with anterior facts. They are weak, not because 
they are made, but because they are unwisely or 
unjustly made. 

A Federal system is more artificial than other sys- 
tems only because it is the highest refinement of 
human policy. It is more artificial only in the sense 
that all consummate achievements of art, of literature, 
of science, are more artificial ; only in the sense that 



Oration. 21 

every matured product of intelligence and reason is 
more artificial than the untutored instinct of the savage. 
That a body politic, thus formed, should be less com- 
pact than barbarian or feudal monarchies, would imply 
that civilization itself is anarchy. 

The Federal systems of ancient Greece were weak, 
because their starting point was the separate sover- 
eignty of cities ; oui's is strong because the collective 
sovereignty of the American people is the broad basis 
on which it rests. It might indeed be questioned 
whether the term " federal " is strictly applicable to a 
' system that so radically departs from all former types. 
In the more exact phrase of Mr. Phillimore, we may 
call it a " composite state." It is, in every essential 
aspect, a new experiment, the logical working out of 
the most advanced political ideas of modern times. 

The strange craft that shot so suddenly the other day 
into the harbor of St. Johns, when the frightened watch- 
man fled his post announcing that a sinking ship was 
coming in, did not more truly embody an original idea, 
than do our institutions. Like that watchman, most of 
those abroad who, five years ago, had their gaze for the 
first time fixed upon us by the breaking out of the civil 
conflict, thought they saw a sinking ship. Like that 
little craft which has safely ploughed its way across the 
ocean, and now floats beside the frowning' batteries of 
England, proclaiming, wherever she bears the Star 
Spangled Banner, that a new age of naval warfare has 
come, the Republic decried and denounced, with 
prophets of evil predicting that she was fit only for 
smooth seas and summer gales, across a darker and a 
stormier sea has held her victorious course, and to- 
day, in the pride of unbroken strength, and in the 



22 ■ ■ Oration. 

majesty of perfect proportion, is proclaiming to the 
world the triumph of an experiment that has no paral- 
lel in the recorded history of mankind. 

Fellow citizens, have I j)ainted too bright a picture ? 
Is the ship of the Republic safe in port, or is she still 
tossed on the open sea ? Let us not disguise the diffi- 
culties of the hour. We have still a great work to doj 
a work, in some respects, the most complex and diffi- 
cult ever presented to any people ; but is it a work 
beyond our strength ? If I had nothing in which to 
put my trust but an individual, or a party, I might in- 
deed be filled with apprehension. But ours is not the- 
government of one man, nor the government of one 
party. I look beyond the mere functionaries to the 
source from which they derive their powers. I turn 
from the petty jealousies and miserable bickerings of 
the servant's hall, to the serene atmosphere of the pres- 
ence chamber. I build my hopes, not on the tinkering 
expedients of politicians, but in the sound, unerring in- 
stincts of the sovereign people. 

No nation that ever existed depended so little as does 
ours upon its mere form of government. To my mind, 
the crowning moment in our great conflict was not when 
the first gun, fired on Sumter, was followed by the mag- 
nificent ujirising of a great people ; when the whole 
North burned with an enthusiasm that has had nothing 
like it since the days of the Crusades ; but rather that 
dark, that dreadful hour when, with the nation reeling 
beneath the blow that smote its beloved chief, the great 
duties of the State passed without a break or a jar to 
the hands of his successor. That was the real triumph 
of our institutions. I would have all other days, how- 
ever glorious, be forgotten. I would have all other 



Oration. ' 23 

pictures fade away, before I would part with that, for 
not Gettysburg, nor Chattanooga, nor Petersburg, not 
Hooker fighting above the clouds, nor Farragut lashed 
to the mast-head, nor Sherman holding his mighty 
march to the sea that roared and clapped its hands as 
it sent to the sky the sheen of his terrible banners, 
was such a spectacle as the calm self possession of that 
hour. 

With such proofs of national capacity, can we doubt, 
fellow-citizens, that, with the blessing of Providence, 
the great problem before us will be solved ? that the 
nation, guided by the great principles which illuminate 
her history, will march on without faltering, in the path 
on which the light shineth more and more, that, swayed 
by the increasing influences of a christian civilization, 
recognizing no distinction of color or race, extending 
to all, alike the blessings of liberty and the safeguards 
of law, the land of our fathers, coming from her bap- 
tism of blood, with the dove of divine peace resting 
upon her, will merit the benediction: "This is the 
people in which I am well pleased?" By the mercy of 
God, while Europe rings with arms, we are left to pur- 
sue the nobler arts of peace. Let the victories of war 
be eclipsed by the grander victories of Justice and 
Truth. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



01 1 836 755 8 



1 



